I think the new Republican House procedural rules are worthy of discussion. Nobel prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman, has some fun with those rules here.....but Krugman, as all Americans have been informed by now, is a communist infiltrator, probably originally born in Venezuela or Cuba, who later changed his name from Hugo Chakrugvez to what he claims it is today.

Anyway.....here are the new Republican procedural rules in the House, and they are doozies....

■The new rules announced December 22 would replace pay-as-you-go with a much weaker, one-sided “cut-as-you-go” rule, under which increases in
mandatory spending would still have to be paid for but tax cuts would not.

In addition, increases in mandatory spending could be offset only by reductions in other mandatory spending, not by any measure to raise revenues such as by closing unproductive special-interest tax loopholes. For example, the House would be barred from paying for continuation of a provision enacted in 2009 (and extended in the just-enacted tax compromise) that enables many minimum-wage families to receive a full, rather than a partial, Child Tax Credit by closing wasteful tax breaks for multinational corporations that shelter profits overseas. Use of such an offset would violate the new House rules because the provision expanding the Child Tax Credit for working-poor families counts as spending and hence could not be paid for by closing a tax loophole. Yet the same new rules would enable the House to expand tax loopholes for multinational corporations and wealthy investors without paying for those tax breaks at all, because any tax cut, no matter how costly or ill-advised, could now be deficit financed.

■The new rules would stand the reconciliation process on its head , by allowing the House to use reconciliation to push through bills that greatly increase deficits as long as the deficit increases result from tax cuts, while barring the use of reconciliation in the House for legislation that reduces the deficit if that legislation contains a net increase in spending (no matter how small) that is more than offset by revenue-raising provisions.

Tax cuts no longer will have to be offset with spending cuts. Now that is some fiscal responsibility that the richest 2% of America can really believe in. Krugman calls it the "new voodoo." The Reverend calls it bullsh*t.

Not only are the Republicans installing Alice in Wonderland procedural rules in their new Boner-led Tea Party House, but those new rules institutionalize the insanity that tax cuts don't cost anything and therefore don't have to be paid for with offsets in spending.

Theoretically, from the top of Boner's Big Rock Candy Mountain, taxes could be reduced to zero.....and the federal treasury would have more revenue than it ever did. All at zero cost to anyone.

Because Unicorn rider, John of Orange, is now institutionalizing new and improved voodoo as the official religion of the House of Representatives......new fairy dust results are oh-so-inevitable. Because deep, tax cuts over the last decade have worked out so well in increasing federal revenue while not costing the U.S. one penny....all while creating six or seven zillion new jobs in the process....shouldn't all federal taxes simply be eliminated by the West Chester Crybaby?